03. The Maze in the Mirror (24 page)

"Yes. Two things. First, I want the number and location of all known parallel duplicates of all nine of you and where they are now. Physical checks to see if they're still where they should be."

That got him interested. "Duplicates you say . . . Why do-oh, all right. Sorry. And what else?"

"If Maria is going to continue with me then she has to be with me at all times. I don't want her trotting off
every so often to confess and so put on the record things she knows that I don't want our suspects to know. She needs something every few days or a week or so."

"Yes. So?"

"Wait a minute. I'm going to keyboard entry," I told him, then tapped out a series of instructions. I knew this terminal and system well and so I had no
problems in leaving the echo off, so nothing I typed appeared on the screen. "You got that?"

"Yes, I have it. And I, uh, can see your point. All right. I'll arrange it. Anything more?"

"No, that's it. Just get me to Mancini next. After that I probably should talk to Yugarin, and I also want a little chat with Stacy Cutler. The others I'll get to after, unless something comes up."

"No guarantees on the timing or order, but I'll see what I can do," he assured me. "Duplicates, eh? Fascinating ..."

I signed off, turned, and saw Maria staring at me. "What have you done concerning me?" she asked sternly.

"As of now, I'm practically a bigamist," I told her. "You and me are going to eat, sleep, and go everyplace together. Inseparable, except when it's unavoidable, like back in Tarn's world. The lock here has already been reset if Voorhes is as good as his word. You can't leave without me now. No more sneaking back home. No confessing. I'm your confessor for the duration. In fact, you're blocked out of your home world unless I'm with you."

She looked suddenly panicked. "But-I will die! Every five days ..."

"Taken care of," I told her. "We're getting enough of your formula to last for weeks, and if we need more we'll get that when we run low. We'll take one with us, and the rest will be in a dispensing module here that will give you one dose at a time when I give the password to the computer. You sneak any messages, confess anything we learn, or blow any information we don't want blown, and I might have real problems remembering that password. What we know we alone know until it's time. Your confessor also confesses to somebody and so on. If you don't know who's pulling your string and Tarn didn't, either, I sure as hell don't want that someone to know anything I don't wish to tell them."

"You-you can not
do
this!"

I sighed and flopped on the bed. "Baby, I've
done
it, and Voorhes is even now setting up the details. Don't worry. In a way it makes it easier on you."

"Easier?
How?"

"Now you got a real stake in wanting me dead," I told her, rolling over and trying to get a decent nap.

Salvatore Mancini either believed in living dangerously or he was not as concerned as the others with any possible attempts against him, a fact I found revealing just on the face of it.

We'd always known that the opposition network controlled some Company stations and perhaps even some alleged Company worlds-we'd rooted out a lot of bad ones over the years ourselves-but I hadn't expected one of the big boys to feel secure in any area on Company maps. I had to admit it-I was less impressed with this feared underground "opposition" than I was totally disillusioned by the dear old Company, who apparently allowed its operations to be so loose and porous that you could do just about anything in, around, and through them without their noticing so long as the bottom line continued to be huge and the Company world and race rich, fat, and secure behind its very solid electronic walls.

I lost my awe of the Company early on, but these assholes owned the whole damned railroad and seemed incapable of catching whole hostile trains running around on their own tracks and in and out of their own station. That's nothing personal, Bill -when they blind your eyes and give you only a peashooter for defense and do something drastic only after the barn door's been left open and the horses escaped, it's a wonder we got anything done at all.

Anyway, Mancini had this Company world apparently bought and paid for. We walked right into a standard station I guess I'd passed a hundred times myself and never thought about and walked into the usual warehouse type building that was the ideal station. All enclosed, plenty of room, and they did so a lot of shipping and commerce.

In fact, there were thousands of huge cases lined up on the side of the entry floor, ready to be loaded into special containers and shipped up and down the line. Curiosity got the better of me; we'd no sooner stepped away from the still slightly hissing electronic cube and onto solid cement and I'd gotten the sight of those endless but perfectly identical cases lined up there than I walked over and read the stenciled lettering on many of the cartons, which was, to my surprise, in English.

I could hardly believe it, so I kept walking down the line of cartons, going on and on and piled maybe ten high, reading the boxes.

"You seem fascinated by the cartons," Maria noted. "Why? Is it important to the case?"

I shook my head no. "Uh uh. They're what's known as compact disks. A hundred to a carton, and maybe, oh-a thousand cartons. A hundred
thousand compact disks of the best of Slim Whitman." I sighed. "I always wondered just where he was the best selling singer of all times. I guess this is it."

We continued to walk towards the exit stairs along the cartons when somebody on the control bridge above gave a shout. I couldn't tell what was being shouted, but it stopped me momentarily, so that a couple of cartons came crashing down just inches in front of me. I whirled, and there was a lot of action on the bridge and I heard footsteps running and a door slam.

"Someone tried to push them on you!" Maria shouted. "Shall I give chase?"

"Uh uh. If they can be caught they'll be run down by the people who know this place best." I bent down, examining the hundreds of compact disks that were all over the place after the boxes split when they hit the cement. I picked one up and looked at it, then tossed it away.

"Now I am really mad," I told her. "It would have been bad enough to be brained by Slim Whitman, but they tried to get me with
101 Strings.
That's one obituary I just couldn't have stood." I sighed, and we walked towards the exit.

Two men in black uniforms-not military types, more like warehouse garb-came up to me. They looked like Bud and Al, the guys who tune up my car at the State College Boron station, but I figured they were station security.

"Mister Horowitz? Are you all right?" one of them asked, at least sounding sincere.

I nodded. "Yeah, we're O.K. Did you catch him?"

"I only saw a figure-too far to make out much
else," he replied. "It looked like he had a Company uniform on, though. They're chasing him down, but there's like a couple of hundred guys around wearing uniforms like this. I wouldn't get my hopes up, but we'll sure as hell grill everybody."

"Big help. Look, can we get out of here and someplace where we can do what we came to do?"

"We got the outside sealed now, and only a few handpicked people are in here now," the security man responded. "I threw the security locks as soon as I could get to the control. Too late to shut him in, but we're secure now."

"You probably thought that ten minutes ago," Maria snapped.

He shrugged. "Come with me. I have explicit instructions on this matter and I think we want to clear the floor here-just in case."

I didn't have any arguments to that, but as we followed him his partner bent down and picked up one of the CDs. "Jeez!" he said.
"101 Strings!"
He paused, then added, "Well, at least it wasn't the Montovanis."

I wasn't sure I was going to like this world at all. Fortunately, I guess, I didn't have to. We followed the man up to the bridge itself and into the high-tech control center, past two Type Two humans who were monitoring the equipment. It was a risk to have Type Two people in the stations, but there were always a few in control no matter what. Some of the Type Two races were absolute wizards at both running and repairing the highly complex station machinery-something in what they could see or hear or some inbred talent for microforgery or something. Type Twos were humanoid but not at all human. This pair, maybe mates, had bulging
black eyes and snouts like wild boars among their more lovable attributes.

We went into a back office, and I could see the elaborate extra security system even as we passed through it. There was an outer office, then more security system, then an inner office. The security man didn't knock; he opened the inner door and we were ushered into a large, comfortable-looking room with a nice desk, a small phone bank on it, and a couple of padded office chairs in front and on either side of it. In back of the desk sat Salvatore Mancini, looking every inch a fugitive from either a
Godfather
movie or an indictment in Newark.

The office was smoky, and he was smoking a cigarette when we entered. From the looks of the ashtray on the desk, he seldom stopped smoking when he was awake.

He did not rise to meet us but did nod, then gestured to the chairs. "Please, take seats," he told us, then looked at the security man. "That will be all for now, Brenner. Go find that traitor. You think on this--I will have someone hung up to dry for allowing anyone to get inside this very building who is not ours. You and your associates should make a decision on whether I hang up the traitor or perhaps you."

Brenner looked unhappy and started to say something, but Mancini silenced him. "Go!"

Brenner went, closing the door after him.

I expected Mancini to sound like Marion Brando or at least Jack Nicholson, but he had a cultured baritone voice with just a trace of an English accent. Real classy. Still, the way he talked to Brenner suggested that my initial reaction to his
looks was closer to the mark, or he was putting on a fairly good act for us.

"You wanted to see me," he said impatiently, "and now you do. So speak to me. My time is valuable and I do not like to be in one place very long, particularly considering the incident outside just now."

"You don't live here, then?" I said more than asked. "We're just in a neutral but secure meeting point."

"That should be obvious."

"You seem pretty complacent about that attempt on me back there," I noted. "What if that was a Company man?"

"Not likely. A Company man would have made the attempt on
me,
not you. It doesn't matter, though. I have a number of ways out of here and I have never been caught, trapped, or otherwise compromised, and in the few minutes I have to be vulnerable I have a great deal of shielding and protection. One learns if one wishes to move about freely with unknown threats about. The known threats are bad enough."

I believed him on that, although I didn't like how casually he was taking it in spite of that. The penetration
had
to bug the hell out of him-unless he was either a superior actor at hiding his real self or he was the guy who ordered it. I decided to get right to the point.

"You worked out the .system for shutting down the Labyrinth," I began.

He nodded. "With Kanda, yes. The tolerances are so fine and the margins so slim that the kind of math required was beyond me. I have some of the best computers in any universe here, but unless
you know the right questions to ask they are useless."

"I need to confirm a scenario I've got. Yugarin came up with the idea independently, then came to you to find out if it was possible or feasible. You took it, figured out how it could be done, took it to Kanda who did the math, from which you worked out the theories and set up the engineering of the actual project."

"You have a good grasp of it. I wonder why you needed to see me on this."

O.K., Tarn told me to ask, so I asked. "What are the odds of a complete success? As nearly as you and Kanda can figure them? That is, of shutting down the system beyond repair while leaving at least the vast bulk of worlds untouched?"

His big, black, bushy eyebrows rose. "You surprise me, Mister Horowitz. You really do. I assume you have also thought through what you already know might cost you?"

I nodded. "Beside the point in this matter, sir. Everything that's been happening to your organization is tied in with that project and the decision to go ahead with it. I no longer have any doubts about that. Will you answer my question?"

He shrugged. "Dead even of complete success. This is uncharted physics."

Even I was startled like that. "Fifty-fifty? You mean you're going ahead with this when there's only a fifty-fifty chance of doing it right?"

"Not as bad as all that. The odds of a partial success-a crippling of the system so badly that it could not be restored within a century or two- rise to eighty-three percent."

I whistled. "So there's a seventeen percent
chance of it going completely wrong?"

He nodded. "But that's in either direction. It's in the nature of the thing. It encompasses all the possibilities other than complete or partial success, including the ones we can not think of because we can't imagine them-and including the fact that it will simply dim the lights and give the Company a temporary but curable cold."

"Yeah, well, maybe, but can you figure the odds, plus or minus whatever, that this will be a worst case scenario? That it will destroy every universe to which the Labyrinth is connected?"

"Oh, there's no chance of
that,"
he said reassuringly. "The system is powered from the Zero Universe, it's true, which contains all of the energy and matter potential to create a universe but which somehow didn't go off in the Big Bang, and that's enough potential to disrupt a considerable amount, but certainly by the time it is diffused through the billions of Labyrinth universes and who knows how many weak points it will be quite scattered."

I held up my hand. "Hold it-Doctor, isn't it? Well, I've got a B.A. in criminology so bear with me. I do read a lot and my wife tells me I'm bright, but this is a little outside my field. You're saying we get all this power from an uncreated universe? One in which the Big Bang never happened?"